There were a few differences between the parachute jump Tom Rice did 70 years ago and the one he made Friday.

The first time, he was a 22-year-old Army paratrooper in the skies over Normandy, jumping in the dark as part of a massive Allied invasion of German-occupied France that was a turning point of World War II and became known as D-Day.

Friday, he was a 92-year-old retired high school teacher from Coronado, doing a tandem jump in the middle of the day near Otay Lakes as a way to honor those who never came home from the war.

This time, he was quick to point out, “nobody was shooting at me.”

The commemorative jump, his third in as many years, went smoothly. Rice removed his hearing aids. Parachute instructor Jay Stokes, retired Army special forces, strapped him into the harness and they walked out of the plane at 13,000 feet.

After free-falling for about a minute, Stokes opened the parachute at 5,000 feet and they glided down for about four minutes before reaching the ground in a field next to Skydive San Diego.

“Nice drop,” Rice said, while his wife, a daughter and son-in-law, and several friends smiled widely and took photos. “I enjoyed that.”

There wasn’t much to enjoy about D-Day, he told reporters. He and others with the 101st Airborne Division didn’t know what they would encounter when they crossed the English Channel in C-47 cargo planes at about 1:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944.

Their job was to prevent a German counteroffensive by securing roads, bridges and canals behind the beaches of Normandy, where thousands of Allied forces would come ashore later that morning to breach Hitler’s heavily fortified Atlantic Wall.

Enemy flak greeted the planes. Rice remembers seeing the tracer bullets streak up from the ground. He heard some hit the left wing and watched another plane in his formation catch fire. When the jump light turned green, he went out first — and got snagged.

The plane had lurched up as he jumped, pinning his left armpit in the corner of the doorway. His legs were twisting in the air. With other soldiers jumping over his head, he wrenched himself free, scraping his arm and losing a Hamilton wristwatch he’d just bought.

“I hope some good Frenchman got it,” he said.

Scattered by the enemy fire and heavy clouds, the paratroopers wound up spilled across hundreds of miles of the Cotentin Peninsula. Using clickers that sounded like crickets and pre-arranged passwords, they gradually found each other and went about their missions.

At one point, Rice’s group of about 50 jumpers and glider pilots captured hundreds of Germans. Near the end of D-Day, he and two other soldiers sent to guard a canal gate got into a firefight and killed a German paratrooper. They made a crude cross out of tree limbs and buried him in a garden.

Rice spent the next month fighting in France as the Allies moved from town to town. He made one more combat jump, in September 1944, into Holland as part of Operation Market-Garden.